City Politics -- Behind The Scenes (Sort of)

So if you've been keeping up with local Ottawa news lately, the city's mayor, Larry O'Brien, has been charged with two crimes: pretending to have an influence on the Government of Canada and accused of bribing another mayoral candidate, Terry Kilrea, to drop out of the mayoral race and offer him a position on the National Parole Board and cash.

To be honest, I did not vote in the last municipal election, because I really...well, I don't really have a reasonable excuse (I know this is bad, especially coming from a Poli Sci student). All I knew was the mayoral race was hotly contested between O'Brien, Kilrea, Bob Chiarelli (incumbent), and Alex Munter. Munter was leading throughout most of the campaign until the end, when O'Brien jumped past him within the last poll and eventually defeated Munter.

Well, if you do some research on the voter distribution, Munter would have easily won the race had it not been the rural/urban divide. But that is a whole other story that you can seriously just search on wikipedia (search: Alex Munter). With these charges, there have been calls for O'Brien to step down and for Munter to be appointed mayor. I know, from this year's City Politics (taught by Alex Munter himself!) class that that cannot happen, unless Munter runs for mayor.

Here's an interesting article that was in the Ottawa Citizen on Dec. 11, 2007, written by Kelly Egan.

Just a year ago, Alex Munter had his eyes on the prize

Well, well. Welcome to Swaggerville, where men are men and mayors wear chains to the office.

And they say Ottawa is Ennui on the Rideau.

Yesterday was quite a blur. Will he be charged? Should he step aside? Who would fill in? Could he actually go to jail?

The mind races not to yesterday, however, but to more than a year ago.

Should the mayor be found guilty of criminal charges, who are the victims?

Larry O'Brien, when all is said and done, will still be a high-tech millionaire. It is a matter of how high he can hold his head.

During the election of November 2006, Bob

Chiarelli's time was up. Nothing quite says "over and out, chief" like third place and 15.5 per cent of the popular vote.

Terry Kilrea, though a plucky underdog, was never going to be mayor of the city. The

financing, the track record just weren't there.

Alex Munter is another story. I think it's pretty obvious Mr. O'Brien's entry in the race spoiled the carefully laid plans of the wonder kid from Kanata.

Just to review.

Now only 39, Mr. Munter has had 25 years with varying

degrees of public profile since he began a community newspaper at age 14.

Elected to Kanata city council at age 23, he remained on the official political scene until 2003, when he decided not to run for city office, opting for journalism and academia instead.

Yet he was ever-present. He had networks all over the place -- in media, in politics, in social advocacy circles -- and reaching across party lines. Tories spoke highly of him; Liberals relied on his guidance; the NDP courted him.

Imagine that a poll taken in 2005, when he was out of office, had him slightly ahead of then-mayor Bob Chiarelli.

Mr. Munter said something quite telling in an interview with Citizen writer Mark

Sutcliffe in January, weeks after his defeat. He admitted that he'd had six "serious offers" to run federally or provincially in the previous four years.

He turned them all down. Why? Obviously, to compete for the job he wanted most: mayor of the nation's capital.

He certainly went about it methodically. He announced his candidacy in February 2006, nine months before the vote. Nine months is a long time to stare at the prize. Probably too long.

He was going to fix the Chiarelli light-rail transit plan. He had ideas about affordable housing, domestic violence, wireless Internet, recycling and organic waste. Something to say to seniors, the city's youth, the city's trees.

From Day 1, he would have been ready for the job,

unlike Mr. O'Brien, who had never sat through an entire council meeting in his life.

He could not have anticipated the freight train that became the O'Brien campaign.

Only once in the last 80 years did a candidate with no political experience manage to win election to the mayor's chair. His name is Larry O'Brien.

How did he do it?

Well, simplicity of message played a big part. So did freshness of face and a lack of political baggage.

Mr. O'Brien's tactic of making taxes the key issue struck a chord with voters in the suburbs and rural fringes.

Bruce Anderson is president of Harris/Decima Research, which did extensive polling during the campaign and correctly predicted the outcome.

It was a volatile campaign, he said yesterday, and the desire for change was strong. Speculating on an outcome -- absent one or two candidates -- is folly, cautioned Mr. Anderson, but perhaps inevitable.

"Mr. Munter was well-placed as somebody in whom people who wanted change could repose their hopes." However, among voters fixed on taxation, there was concern about his activist agenda.

Mr. Anderson was asked what might have happened if both Mr. Kilrea and Mr. O'Brien had stayed in the race, possibly splitting the tax-fighting vote. "It's plausible that Mr. Munter would have won that race."

And what of Mr. Munter's future political aspirations? City voters have said No once, fairly resoundingly. Does it make sense for a candidate with the same political leanings to try again? Or switch political arenas altogether?

For now, he has chosen graceful silence over the O'Brien matter. Now the executive-director of the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa, Mr. Munter declined to be interviewed yesterday about the man who derailed his dream.

"Like everyone else, I'm obviously reading the papers and following the news, but I don't think there's anything much for me to say right now," he wrote in an e-mail.

"I am very much enjoying the Youth Services Bureau -- it's an amazing organization filled with people who are committed to making a difference. That's my focus."

I find this very ironic considering we just ended class last week and the charges came a few days later and phone lines were buzzing with calls for Alex Munter to return to city politics.

I was going to blog about my City Politics course awhile back, but put it off because I was so busy. Honestly, I believe it was one of the best courses I've ever taken. The workload was not very heavy and each class was filled with different debates and discussions. On top of that, we had a course convener (not a professor, he reminds us), that had loads of experience and connections. We had different guest speakers including the Deputy City Clerk, Larry O'Brien's former Chief of Staff, and two city councillors. We even got to go to City Hall to attend an advisory board committee meeting.

In the beginning, everyone was pretty starstruck about being in the presence of (and being taught by) Alex Munter! Like seriously, he ran for mayor! Like OMG! Then we pretty much settled down that he was just another ordinary person (but with loads of experience). One thing that I enjoyed about the course was that although he had loads of experience, he did not present the course from his own experiences, but rather what city politics is like in Canada in general. Of course, he gave us examples of his own experiences, but did not go overboard. In our last class, he mentioned that he did not want to dive into too much about his own experiences and his mayoral race failure because there was no point to it. "Why be bitter?" he said. "Life goes on and I'm happy where I am right now".

I agree with Alex very much. Why be bitter about a defeat? Life goes on. If we continue to dwell on our past and never move on, we will never be achieve anything new.